Skewed surveys Uncritical reporting and poorly-formed survey questions have lead to a "profound misreading" of the Australian public's response to climate change, a psychology conference will hear this week.

"I'm not trying to beat up the media or to be overly critical of my colleagues but there is a disconnect between what the data is saying, what's out there in the media, and where the public is at," says Reser, an environmental and social psychologist at Griffith University and the University of Queensland.

"We have to be serious about survey research on climate change," he adds.

"The consequences of getting it wrong does no justice to the public and also leads to flawed policy."

Reser says while the best available social science research shows a high level of public concern and engagement with the climate change issue, the general picture portrayed in the media suggests otherwise.

"I think over the past five or six years in Australia there has been a serious underestimation of how concerned the Australian public is about climate change and how distressed they are at so little government action," he says.

Reser says the misreading of public responses to climate change has had political implications.

"Going into the election there was a very clear sense that far fewer Australians accepted that climate change was happening than was actually the case," he says.

'Surveys ain't surveys'

Reser says the problem is partly that the media does not discriminate between surveys that are based on research and those that are not.

"There are surveys and surveys," says Reser. "Social science based research surveys are very different from a casual poll of opinions."

"Very large headlines will come out sometimes for a survey that might have one or two items related to climate change in it."

Such surveys, he says, are unable to properly measure such things as level of concern, underlying beliefs, and desire for action.

He says even some research-based surveys have included poorly-formed questions making it difficult to get a clear picture from the results.

Lost in translation

In addition, says Reser, some research-based surveys have been presented publicly in a way that misrepresents their overall findings.

For example, he says, the best available international research-based surveys shows between 80 and 90 per cent of people - in Australia, Europe and the US - accept climate change is a problem that governments and individuals can and should take action against.

However, media reports have often cited a 2010 CSIRO research-based survey as evidence that 40 per cent of people do not believe humans are playing a role in climate change, says Reser.

Yet, he says, this figure was based on one "unfortunately framed question and its associated response options". When taken as a whole, the CSIRO survey results showed the vast majority agreed that climate change was an issue of concern, says Reser.

He says one problem with survey designs is that questions can often be framed in a way that presents a false dichotomy to survey respondents.

For example, the CSIRO study asked respondents to choose between the following statements: "I think that climate change is happening, but it's just a natural fluctuation in Earth's temperatures" or "I think that climate change is happening, and I think that humans are largely causing it".

This gave no option for people who believed both natural fluctuations and human activity contributed substantially to climate change, says Reser.

Confusing the issues

Also, says Reser, some survey questions elicit a response that confuses beliefs about the severity of climate change and the policy question of what should be done about it.

This is a problem because some people can be quite concerned about the impacts of climate change, but are also concerned about the cost of doing something about it.

A further problem, says Reser, is that even research-based surveys often don't acknowledge that the public tend to use the term 'climate change' to refer to what the scientific community calls 'anthropogenic climate change'.

Reser says, this confusion has resulted in many survey results misreading the public's genuine response to climate change.